More than half of Europe's forests have disappeared over the past 6,000 years due to increased demand for agricultural land and the use of wood as fuel, according to researchers from Plymouth University. Analyzing pollen samples from more than a thousand sites found that more than two-thirds of Central and Northern Europe were once covered with trees. Nowadays it has declined to one third, although in many western and coastal regions, including the United Kingdom and Ireland, the extent of the decline was much greater, the coverage of the forested areas fell below 10 percent. At the same time, the trend has begun to turn back due to the discovery of new types of fuel and construction techniques and ecological, forestry initiatives and projects. Experts have reported their findings in the Nature journal . 

Source: Greenfo/MTI